I have personally owned and operated underpowered bulky and unnesasairily heavy e-bikes from blue avenue and daymak. They all suck. The e-bikes themselves are fine, in some case really nice, and in every case suffer from an acute case of anemia. Gutless, heavy, TOXIC lead acid batteries are to blame, along with the crappy low V. PWM controllers they ALL come with.

I “modded” my “daymak” austin “double” first, I removed the nasty and deadly toxic hunk o shit battery out. Soldered up two 36V 40Ah packs (A123 systems) installed TWO 72V 50A PWM control boxes, Removed the passive front wheel and replaced it with another “500w”brushless hub motorized wheel.

The whole thing cost about $2000, with an additional $1000 for the bike, and another $500 for a Trailer that I can tow up to 200Lbs cargo. Total cost $3500 for a complete solution for shopping, touring, commuting ect. Not everyone is ready for an ebike that can push 80km/hr, climb any hill with a passenger, pull a trailer ect… I am . SO as far as the pilot project goes, good luck. AS always people will do what they need to do…Anyone else interested in freedom?

The whole support structure for e-bikes in Ontario, and maybe Canada, is awful. I don’t think it’s fair to blame any one dealer. The distributors import these bikes from China and don’t ensure there is any consistency in parts. I had to have a friend custom make a small cover for the battery lead (where the charger plugs into the battery) because no-one had the part. Not the dealer, not the distributor, etc… It’s just crazy.

As for Blue Avenue, my Malta was recently blown over by the windstorm we had and the brake lever snapped in two. I phoned around and people simply didn’t know. I went to Blue Avenue as they have a shop near where I live and they fixed it in a day. Reasonable price, great service and I did not buy that product there.

The pilot project is coming to an end in October, 2009. There has been no word from the government and the normal bike community is not exactly e-bike friendly. The Veloteq’s are really nice but this type of model may end up placing major restrictions on all e-bikes when it comes to bike paths and so on. After all we are talking about moped weights.

In short, the dealers in Ontario are in a bind. The distributors just import stuff and there’s no government leadership. Compare this to some other provinces. It’s really disgraceful.

Anyway, I would certainly recommend Blue Avenue based on my experience, but I am not into the non-bike type e-bike and that is basically what they sell.

Until the e-bike community gets its service act in order I can’t imagine too many people risking $1000+ on these items.

philip

They are in the process of starting a new webpage and this was thier first one.

I love these bikes!